Thoughts on pitch pool examples

by Zilong Zhai

I compared videos of Ingenia and Recombo. As an audience, I like the video of Ingenia, the presentation is concise and well structured, her plan is attractive and convinced, and also the request is rather low, only $ 100,000. Maybe ten minutes are too short, but if I were to invest, I need a more detailed plan from them.

The most important reason I like their presentation is that they know their problems, which is very important for the future development. When the lady said that they are not good at selling expertise in home market, I once thought they want investment to help them improve on that part. As it will be a great business to introduce educational technologies into home market or even integrate them into mobility devices. But they are right, they will face a lot of competitors in that market and in Canada, and they are not good at it. It is a good choice and strategy to utilize their advantages in a undeveloped market with great potential – Vietnam.

Of course there are a lot of unanswered questions in their presentation, many of them have been mentioned and discussed, like country regulations and policies, culture difference and barriers. But these problems can be solved, they need to do a good survey on their target market and hire several local experts who familiar with the government regulation and education system. From my experience, if they do it right, they will even face less challenges in these developing countries than in many developed countries.

On the other hand, they need to prepare to face the competitors, even there are not a lot currently. They are selling a service, not a product, so when people realize that it is a good business, they will all squeeze into the market Foreign competitors are not a big threat, but when local companies begin to show up, they only have two choices: become a local company or leave the market.

Most importantly, their services also need to be examined, if their ability is really as good as they said, Ingenia is really a precious investment opportunity.

However, regarding Recombo, maybe it’s my problem as I am not familiar with the product they try to sell, I found the presentation long and unfocused, and it is not interesting and attractive. They compared themselves with many famous companies who made big success, but I cannot find relationship between them. Whatever, I admit I don’t like the feeling that they “force” me to believe that they are the best.

At last I want to mention that I really like the style of their presentation, PPT slide show on one side and “face-to-face” talking on the other side, it helps me to remember and understanding and also gives me choices to either continue to listen their speech or consider the topics they just mentioned.

Like Zilong I think that Recombo (and Ingenia’s) use of PPT in combination with the face-to-face pitch can help. The problem is when there is an overload of information on the PPT slides and Recombo’s 2004 pitch had that shortcoming. The number of slides, amount of information on them, made it difficult to focus and catch the key information (for example on a couple of the graphs used), so ultimately some of the most important points they are trying to address are lost.

I agree with wour comment about Recombo being rather disjointed and difficult to follow. I believe it had more to do with hardware (a router) than software. The architecture that was built into this specialized hardware allowed for greater communication between various other architectures that were otherwise incapable of communicating with each other.